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Roughly 401 350 children who phone the Gauteng Childline 24-hour toll-free Helpline each year test the counsellors’ trustworthiness before they disclose their stories of abuse.
The children come up with fake stories, sing for the counsellors, insult them, phone them and then drop the phone.
Few have the courage to report genuine cases immediately without first evaluating the counsellors’ attitude towards them.
Helpline manager Faiza Khota and the director of Childline Gauteng Lynn Cawood said that in an attempt to share their gruesome accounts, some of the children phone the Helpline at least 10 to 20 times before they reveal what happened to them.
Khota said children test the lines “to see what kind of service Childline is actually offering, are counsellors trustworthy, can they rely on them to really help or will they be like some adults they have come across out there” who don’t believe them.
She said the children’s aim is to test the counsellors’ response: “Whether they will be interested in listening to them, respond with warmth and empathy, will they ask for more information and believe them.”
To test the counsellors’ trustworthiness, they say something anticipating a negative response and a cut call.
“[The way] a lot of children test the lines and are quite abusive or rude to the counsellors is an indication of what they are exposed to. There is a sense of powerlessness where they feel they need to exert their power in some way or another.
"In those kind of test calls we try to engage them with respect. The right to use the service, but the responsibility to use it in a positive way,” Khota said.
“We try to explain to them that if they are testing the lines all the time that’s great, we would love them to call us, but at the same time, they could be holding up the line for somebody who really does need help and could be struggling to get through to us.”
Khota said of the children who sing to them, they “mostly sing happy birthday songs to us or tell us it is their birthday and that we need to sing for them, which our counsellors do”.
“They will call us maybe if they can’t go to bed to sleep at night and our counsellors are just really gentle with them and read a bedtime story. The counsellors would ask such callers questions, such as: ‘whether you did your homework today, bath, set your alarm for tomorrow morning.
"Let me just tell you a little story’ and then eventually they will say it’s quite late and they can sleep now.
"They [the counsellors] would give them suggestions like maybe ‘don’t play with your phone before you go to bed, don’t watch TV, rather read a book before you go to bed’. We are like secondary parents.
“Sometimes they tell us stories and they even disclose false cases of abuse. As we probe we start to see that this is not a legitimate case.”
City Press spent eight hours at the Gauteng Childline offices in Braampark, Johannesburg, where some calls from children were sweet, but others most distressing.
“I have been raped, they hit me with a bottle,” shouted 11-year-old James* into the phone before hanging up.
The Helpline counsellor asked: “Where are you? Can we contact the police to come and help you?” But he dropped the phone.
James made almost 10 calls to the Helpline. In one of them he asked the counsellor: “Buy me ice cream, kota and mayonnaise.”
Later on he phoned and hurled insults at the counsellor and screamed: “Come and take me to jail.” In the background his friends whispered and giggled, but the counsellor politely responded: “You guys are insulting me.”
James again dropped the phone.
Other children around Gauteng phoned and hung up or shared their experiences.
Thato* (15) phoned and told a counsellor: “I want to leave home. I don’t like what my father is doing, he locked me inside the house.
"My father says I am not his child and beats me up for no reason. No one believes me when I say he beats me up. They think I am just being a normal teenager.”
Before transferring her call to 10111, the counsellor asked her to call the Helpline again after speaking to police.
Thembi* (11), who was offered moral support by her male teacher, phoned to report a “bad man” for a case of child grooming.
The “bad man”, known to Thembi’s* family, had bought her sweets and Lays chips for R6, took her to a park and touched her in an uncomfortable way.
Thembi* said this had happened three times but she begged the counsellor not to contact her parents or the police.
Cawood said: “I think the 24-hour toll-free Helpline – which is 080 00 555 55 – is the most famous number in Gauteng because Khota takes between 20 000 to 30 000 calls a month.
“Many of those are children that are just phoning to play because children’s main way of getting mastery over their world is to play.
"And the fact that they are playing with us is absolutely fine because research shows that children will phone up to 20 times before they disclose whatever has happened to them.
"Khota and her team are mainly the ones who are facilitating child protection.”
In the 2016/17 financial year Gauteng Childline handled about 370 000 calls. But Kotha said the numbers fluctuated from month to month, with school holidays their busiest periods.
Calls are mainly from primary schoolchildren, parents and concerned relatives who might have spotted signs of abuse in a child.
“We offer counselling in all South African languages and French.
“We aren’t able to answer all the calls that are dialled at the moment. But we have the backup of the pager system in which you can leave us a message and a counsellor normally returns the calls, especially those who have been holding for a long time,” said Khota.
“We answer between 70% to 80% calls and that’s because we lack capacity and funding. One of our greatest goals is to answer 100% of the calls.
"But in the past couple of years we really have not had enough capacity to do so, which is a big concern for us as well.”
*Children’s names have been changed to protect their identities
